Waterloo: tunnels, lockpicking and club culture

Matthias Wandel (https://www.youtube.com/@matthiaswandel) is an engineer, woodworker, and YouTuber who runs the most-viewed woodworking channel on YouTube. He was an early employee at Research In Motion, assigned employee number 13. Yacine (https://x.com/yacineMTB) is an engineer building autonomous drones. Both of them are tinkerers, explorers, and builders in their own right. They poke at the world, build and test things for themselves, and develop their own understanding.

In this conversation, we traced a single thread through Matthias’s entire life: what happens when you grow up in a place where the only way to have something is to make it yourself, and then never stop. We started in Northern Ontario, in his dad’s workshop on a gravel road where the nearest store was an hour away, and followed that instinct through his first encounters with computers, a Bic-pen dot matrix printer on a Commodore 64, two brothers with two machines in a basement heated by a wood stove, lock picking in the Waterloo service tunnels, and what it means to be a nerd.

Matthias and Yacine went back and forth on simplicity vs. ease, what LLMs change about the relationship between understanding and building, and why the probability of code getting reused is inverse to the effort you spend making it reusable. Matthias walked through building the DigiSync barcode reader for the motion picture industry, writing almost all the firmware for RIM’s first wireless modem in DSP assembly, watching BlackBerry’s network traffic flip on 9/11, and what it was like to work alongside Mike Lazaridis. He explained why he left BlackBerry while sales were at their peak and how a bandwidth constraint accidentally made his first viral YouTube video.

This is a conversation about constraints that become capability, capability that becomes independence, and independence that becomes something you pass on.

The Other Stuff is hosted by internetVin, filmmaker, entrepreneur, and possibly the most curious man on Earth. Produced by New.

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Timestamps

00:00:00 Intro

00:02:25 ElectroBoom and Styropyro

00:09:55 Potato Guns and Air Guns

00:23:34 Growing Up in Northern Ontario

00:37:16 First Computers and the Bic Pen Printer

00:43:22 Markus Wandel and the Basement

01:00:19 University of Waterloo

01:03:37 Service Tunnels and Lock Picking

01:10:07 What Is a Nerd?

01:11:34 LLMs and Simplicity vs. Ease

01:31:19 How RIM Started

01:44:01 Building the Wireless Modem

01:58:43 Reusability and Optionality

02:14:13 The BlackBerry Pager

02:33:50 BlackBerry and 9/11

02:48:13 Lazaridis and Balsillie

03:05:28 The YouTube Channel

03:26:01 The Capacitance Sensor

03:42:41 Passing It On

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